Article

14 November 2017

By jennifer

It’s time to close all youth prisons

By Marc Schindler and Vincent Schiraldi November 10

Marc Schindler is executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. Vincent Schiraldi is a senior research scientist at the Columbia Justice Lab. They are both former directors of the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services.

Two investigative reports published this month detail shocking conditions in youth prisons in Florida and South Carolina. The Miami Herald meticulously chronicled Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice staff arranging violent bouts between youths and bribing them to beat up other incarcerated youths. In South Carolina, the Charleston Post and Courier reported that the Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation regarding deaths and assaults in the state’s youth facilities. It is tempting to view scandals like these as idiosyncratic acts of malfeasance or incompetence. But a 2016 report published by Harvard Kennedy School and the National Institute of Justice — along with our own experience with juvenile corrections — reveal them to be anything but unusual. These failures only further prove that we should close all youth prisons in the United States and replace them with community programs and smaller rehabilitative facilities near youths’ homes for the few young people who need to be incarcerated. In 2007, the Associated Press surveyed every youth prison in the United States, uncovering 13,000 allegations of abuse in facilities housing 46,000 young people. Two separate reports by the Annie E. Casey Foundation similarly chronicled recurring or systemic maltreatment of incarcerated youth in all but five states from 1970 to 2015.